Agustin Cardenas

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Agustin Cardenas Untitled - pink w_ white base
Untitled - pink w/ white base , 1975
Sculpture
14 1/2 x 10 1/2 in
Agustin Cardenas Untitled
Untitled , 1989
Sculpture
22 1/4 x 10 x 5 1/4 in

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Agustin Cardenas

Agustin Cardenas

Agustin Cardenas Biography

We live in an age in which art is generally acknowledged only if it is “successful in the marketplace” and when gross misinterpretations of art have been institutionalized. It is therefore comforting to know of the existence of someone like Cárdenas, not only to know that he exists, but that he is still creating, that is to say, inventing. Because Cárdenas is to sculpture what Bacon is to painting: there is only one… Cárdenas belongs to a group of kindred spirits who during the 20th century have made sculptures an intellectual activity, “a mental thing” according to Leonardo’s principles, but without cutting off contact with beauty, beauty that discovered its fundamental truth in the primitive art of Africa, native America and the Pacific. Thus the true peers of Cárdenas are Brancusi, Arp and Henry Moore… With Brancusi, he shares the love of volumes, constantly caressed and used to a vertiginous degree, plumbed to the very essence, to the depths of the soul. With Arp, he shares a taste for budding forms captured at the dawn of life and full of the uncertainty of the future. In a way that is contrary to the message of Brancusi and Arp, Cárdenas shares with Moore a sovereign certainty which authorizes a decisive plunge into the universe of beings and things… In any case, Cárdenas has no difficulty in distinguishing himself from his three illustrious predecessors. Brancusi, for example, increasingly caresses the shape of the egg, the seal, and the column. All of theses are symbols of his own virility, which never ceases to amaze him. With Cárdenas, on the other hand, it is clear that he caresses shapes of women. If one discovers here and there a phallic presence, it is because it plays a role in the celebration of loving union, a celebration as fervent as it is chaste. By chaste I mean devoid of any allusion to bad company. Women happily recognize themselves in the work of the Cuban sculptor because he reveals, like no one else, the essence of their femininity… It is also clear if Arp is essentially a son of sleep, Cárdenas is above all a part of the world of wakefulness. We cannot accuse him of delving into the twilight world unless he does so to emerge full of vibrant hope. He is rather than man of frenzied plant growth, as well as of the power of a tree root shifting the foundations of a temple, the sinuous force of vine strangling a tree, the extravagant beauty of an orchid blossoming at the expense of the vine, the tree and the temple. In contrast to Moore’s arbitrary and sometimes despotic decisions, Cárdenas is more markedly concerned with the harmony of the world. At the same time he has greater respect for beings made of flesh and blood but also of dreams. He prefers to glorify the human condition rather than denigrate it, to strengthen rather than destroy, to reveal peoples’ secret affinities instead of their insurmountable differences… Of course, in praising such an artist, one cannot limit oneself to making simplistic comparisons. Only a few years ago Cárdenas showed us that he was not at all a prisoner of these artist’s plastic rhetoric. He took us by surprise when he exhibited his bronze horse in 1984 at the F.I.A.C., thus affirming his capacity to link himself to the figurative tradition as fully as he had done before with the lyrical tradition which gave birth to modern art, this was not going against what he believed in the past, but sprang from a desire to widen the imprint of his own creativity… It is worth thinking back to Cárdenas arrival in Paris, on Christmas day of 1995. the flamboyant Cuban artist deliberately pitted himself against the basic materials of sculpture. Wood and bronze surrendered to him unconditionally, despite the fact that his techniques were those of a charmer rather than a conqueror. Naturally, it is vain to think that a mastery of materials guarantees a creator’s inventiveness. Even if, nowadays, so many others are happy to pile bricks and rubble on the floor in a corner, convinced that they have constructed the walls of Babylon before our very eyes! There may be certain people who consider Cárdenas’s path old-fashioned. But his love of materials is a strong as his love for shapes elaborated through intimacy and fervor. The crowning achievement of his two-fold love is the nurturing of a poetic invention which is truly “in a human dimension.”

Agustin Cardenas Description

Born in Matanzas, Cuba on April 10, 1927. Cárdenas was a sculptor who was active in the Surrealist movement in Paris. His sculpture was influenced by Brancusi, Henry Moore, and Jean Arp.

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